Scampir

'We're not safe here' In the immediate days after, creators have found themselves at a loss of what to do. Game developer krispycat, also known as ButterflyLatte, reports that her NSFW game demo, known as "The Seventh Bride," was deindexed, and is only shown when specifically searched for. It wasn't just this game, either. "On a whim, I tried to search up my SFW games as well - Wendy, warm, Like Seafoam. These games are fairly innocent and wholesome; 'warm' and 'Wendy' star children. However, they don't appear in the suggestions either - I suspect it's because they're yuri games," she recounted, describing a genre of fiction which depicts romance between two female characters and has no inherent sexual elements.

Some creators report that an entire game jam - or collection of games developed in a short period to build community - was affected. The Toxic Yuri Game Jam, consisting of over 200 different games, saw significant hits, with over half of the games delisted and several being completely removed from the site. One user, known as Kastel, describes how a joke game they made was delisted squarely for having the tag "erotic." They mention how this jam was filled with first time developers, and how the occurrence of these bans led to mass panic, watching a happy community turn into people feeling completely doomed. "I've done a bunch of these game jams, so I'm giving them advice. And then I'm looking at all this and it's just... what do I even say? This is a pretty bad situation. I can't pretend that this is good. This isn't a wonderful thing we can all survive. It's pretty rough. I feel bad for everyone, especially because it's their first wave of censorship."

“She was not the only developer who reported the company singling out yuri content.”

Games journalists really dropped the ball on itchio targeting yuri content, both SFW and NSFW

The censorship of Toxic Yuri Game Jam hasn’t gotten any coverage from the games press

yeah you're married to the zora king but the statue in the middle of the domain has me on his back

Design Issue 😎. I think combat can be engaging to listen to through it's systems I just do not think people are trying to design for it.

also discourse was better when we clowned on bad takes with game jams

This attitude presupposes that all intellectual labor is the same as being a typewriter salesman superseded by the invention of the computer. As if intellectual labor is stenography. The promise is absolutely that anyone can be as "smart" as an expert without the effort to become an expert.

As the TTRPG media sphere contracts, we're expanding -- Rascal is hiring a news writer!

We're running a short 2 week pledge drive, offering a 6 month, 25% discount, celebrating our Diana Jones Award... nomination... in order to support this new hire.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…

The cost per person per hour of TTRPGs is essentially undefeated in entertainment hobbies. A single purchase unlocks limitless hours of play for a group of people.

If this is the case, then this is exactly what I mean and was simply ignorant. I'm glad the world is better than I thought!

Chief Scientist needs to come back as a job title

It was worth it lol. Everything flowed really well. I think this was the smoothest i've seen a tactics game move in the first session's first combat. 8 minute turns (including time taken to vamp and joke) is nothing to sneeze at.

LRT: to add further nuance, i don't think TTRPGs are too expensive. I think that the ones with brand recognition demand a higher price, but there have been multiple free game movements online that have given internet commenters the attitude that no self-published game should be more than $5 USD.

Other people have responded to the main points...that D&D and in particular the "D&D lifestyle brand as a consumerist hobby" is expensive, but TRPGs by and large are very much not...but I'm going to add to this that most TRPGs, for the labor involved in their production, should be charging way more

There are days when folks in the TTRPG indiesphere really gives off "Dude selling hand-labelled jam at the farmers market is salty because his jam is better but he's not making Smuckers money", and it's just, *waves at the jam and market.*

It's not that ttrpgs, as a product, are expensive. It's that being in a ttrpg *fandom* is expensive. And because the biggest one on the market is a lifestyle brand first and game second that colors how people view "buying in" to a new ttrpg.

The text space is not large enough to reproduce the whole snapshotted page, but this is the relevant concluding half of the final paragraph: "From an abstract point of view there is no difference between the ways in which people shows rely on the inventiveness of their audiences and the Web site reliance on users’ input. People shows rely on the activity (even amidst the most shocking sleaze) of their audience and willing participants to a much larger extent than any other television programs. In a sense, they manage the impossible, creating monetary value out of the most reluctant members of the postmodern cultural economy: those who do not produce marketable style, who are not qualified enough to enter the fast world of the knowledge economy, are converted into monetary value through their capacity to perform their misery."

Too long for the whole page; final paragraph: "The qualitative difference between people’s shows and a successful Web site, then, does not lie in the latter’s democratic tendency as opposed to the former’s exploitative nature. It lies in the operation, within people’s shows, of moral discursive mechanisms of territorialization, the application of a morality that the “excessive” abundance of material on the Internet renders redundant and even more irrelevant. The digital economy cares only tangentially about morality. What it really cares about is an abundance of production, an immediate interface with cultural and technical labor whose result is a diffuse, nondialectical contradiction."

it's sooooo funny how much social media has bridged this gap, allowing people to perform AND monetize their own (and others') misery along with the spontaneous social performance of cacophonous moralism (from Tiziana Terranova's "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy" 2000)

Clarification: this isn't something that background checks or training would have "fixed". The kind of person who wants to do this "job" is the kind of person who's just gonna break shit and take stuff (putting it mildly). The system is just doing what it does.

Furthermore, ice must be destroyed.

One of the things I’ve realized in years (somehow, years?) of listening to folks talk about their work, is that the thing people don’t realize is how much time it takes — not just in workflow, but in all the hours (accrued over months, years, decades) that it took to hone & refine those skills. And:

Something that I have been thinking about with attribution of "PhD level intelligence" or "PhD level expertise" to a machine is that it reflects an increasing trend among these AI bros and their sycophants to want the products of highly skilled training without actually doing any of the work.

I do fear the quality of the analysis would exceed the quality of the material.

Demon World Theory 2

critical support to both andrew hussie and the homestuck community for doing their part to ensure fewer people read homestuck

Sports Illustrated is covering it now.

Time to pretend to be a normie shareholder who wants to know why the brand is damaging its own reputation.

a close up of a cartoon character 's face with his hand on his chin ALT: a close up of a cartoon character 's face with his hand on his chin

@fluxyggdrasil.bsky.social I get it brother

Reading Draw Steel for a game tomorrow morning and just hoping it plays better than it reads. This is the kind of game D&D fans imagine when they say "It's going to be too hard to learn another game! Let's just play D&D"

Panel 1: A father in a blue shirt and khaki pants is holding up the world (represented by a small version of planet Earth) in front of his daughter. The daughter has messy hair with a braid going above the ears on both sides, to the back where it becomes a ponytail, and wears a pink t-shirt and yellow skirt. She is reaching for the world. The father says "Daughter. Like any good father, I want to give you the world." Panel 2: Closeup of her little pants reaching for the world, which is resting in his big hand. Panel 3: The father pulls his hand away, out of reach of this little hands, which are now uncertain and defeated. The background darkens. Panel 4: "... If you can TAKE it from me," says the father. They are now in space, seemingly atop a solid pond reflecting the stars. The father is drippling the world between his legs, stanced up for some 1v1, with a basketball hoop behind him. The daughter looks on in the foreground.

It's not about changing or adding or hacking the ruleset. It's about how to use that ruleset to take the game beyond the authors vision of what the game can do.

Every time i sit down to learn a game to run it, i ask myself "what does it take to learn how to go beyond the game, to colour outside the lines and make something beautiful"

D&D does not have an IP problem. It has a business model problem. MTG benefited from stronger IP because it needed new customers to buy packs for chase rares and the like. D&D doesn't have a mystery box product model.

I disagree. The article has it backwards right? MTG did crossovers at the same time that we saw every 5e SRD under the sun come out. I do not think that putting a WotC sticker on a d20 SRD product like Steamforged's Dark Souls, Renegade's Transformers, or the SW5E cover would move more books.